skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Don’t launch when somebody famous is in ill health." Is this intended to be actual advice? I think the real issue is a shabby product, especially after seeing "make sure your service can sustain more than a couple of people at a time" and "the next 48 hours were spent fixing hundreds of bugs".

Looking at the website I am impressed you at least have an SSL certificate, cause it doesn't look like much more effort went into it. I'm even more confused looking at the about page, it lists David as being a rockstar programmer who enjoys working on difficult scaling problems, yet he didn't plan for more than a couple of users?

If you want to make your service succeed put an embedded Minecraft applet on there and have it link to some of your public servers, maybe even let the user select from a few of them. Just do the same things as http://minecraft.net/demo. Add some color to your site, your target audience isn't a bootstrapped web developer, it's a highschool kid who wants a Minecraft server. Add a big old buy now button on that homepage. And why does the Sign Up page not have the pricing options?
Who said interview? You did.
I'm guessing it wanted you to enable the "bookmarks" extension: I believe hg-git maps git branches to hg bookmarks.

edit: the "installing" section of http://hg-git.github.com/ confirms it.
Well of course we should cut back on defense spending.

But not for any of the projects being done by contractors in my state. We need those jobs.
Establishing a relationship with a reporter is far better than writing a press release. Dmitry Dragilev, formally of ZURB, wrote an excellent article on how startups (and larger businesses) can do this: http://mashable.com/2012/02/27/how-to-pitch-media/
I like BitBucket better then Github.

That should be than. Then is an order of operations type deal, eg:

I read the new BitBucket blog post and *then* I signed up

whereas than is things like greater than, less than, it's for comparisons.

http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/thanthen.h...
Confucius said, "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life."

If you don't work, you don't have to worry about work-life balance.
...they didn't change/redesign anything on the commit view. The commit page on Bitbucket has always always looked that for as long as I can remember (been using it for a year or two now).

Also, I recall having the ability to diff. files before the new upgrade as well, although not side-by-side as they mention in the linked article.
I didn't see the life part of her work life balance.

I always imagined that work life balance meant you had things that you wanted to do in your personal time, and you had the time to do them.

Not 'I love working so much that my balance is all work and little / no life'.
i am worried. even though it touched 16, it still sucks most of my memory and slows down the system and drains the battery immediately (1 hour of power)

Firefox still needs to improve its memory usage.
No. Instead, each state needs to file trespass charges for every farmer who didn't buy seed and had their field cross polinatee.

Then you count how many seeds. There's a trespass charge for each and every one of them. After all, their seeds are their property.
You could make it required for a certificate but not for taking the classed.
Consider the contemporary development programs RAINBOW and GUSTO and these specs don't seem so far out. Rainbow was to add radar stealth the to U2 (cloaking). Lockheed started development of what became the A-12 in the late 50's. It flew reconnaissance 10 years later. The A-12 could fly at mach 3.35 at 75000 ft. and had a range of 2200 nm.

Those specifications were achieved in that era on other programs. I think the answer requires a deeper look.
For many of us, the value is in the learning opportunity. Some people, I imagine, are out of work and need a way to pick up skills and job credentials cheaply. For them I think huge value could be found in a certification. Having a certificate on your resume can start an interesting conversation in an interview, show personal initiative, and so forth.
Mythbusting the responsive design myth
The punches are pulled in this piece. Not only is the compiler continuously complaining, once you ship code, your customers call in to complain about every conceivable bug and a great deal that weren't conceivable. You can have thousands of happy customers, but you as the developer will hear from the three guys with obscure configurations and bizarre setups encountering bugs. Shipping software is ten seconds of "Hooray", followed immediate by a breakdown of what terrible things are already wrong with the next release.

I'm surprised any of us can hold up under the withering torrent of negativity that is any serious programming job.

I actually don't mean this as a complaint, either. I've adjusted. I've been doing this for 15 years. But I've been sort of stepping back lately and looking at my job from other points of view, especially as I deal with coworkers who aren't so adjusted/adapted, and not only do I now understand where they are coming from, I find myself wondering how adaptation is even possible. It's absurd how negative the interactions are. Keep track someday of your professional interactions and look at how many of them are negative; bug reports, missed deadlines, "we can't do that", etc. Or perhaps, don't, if you've never thought about this before. I sure hope you have an otherwise positive workplace.
Now that I have some spare time I'll take another course and pay better attention :)
I think it was more of a broad sketch of a series of interactions, not a formula for an interview. Someone represents themselves as having some skills because they are certified as having those skills; they are asked to apply those skills; etc...
In regards to your edited quote: http://www.coolsprings.com/news/macauthority-closing-for-app...
Yep, same feeling here. There seems to be a new trend of a shifted decimal point: "beta"-ish feel until version 10, and a .1 version bump is now a new release.
Ask HN: Is there a directory of SaaS providers?
There are many useful SaaS products out there, it's just that unless you're looking for something very specific it's difficult to reach them. Is anyone maintaining a directory of them, perhaps sorted by category, etc.?
Gleb from Backblaze here. The drives were literally the same inside the external enclosures. We bought a few to start with to check.

We use consumer-grade drives across our entire 40+ petabyte storage farm because we do not need high-performance drives. Instead, we need low-cost, low-power, high-density drives to put into our custom-designed Storage Pods: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...

We tested "enterprise drives" and found that from a pure reliability perspective, they actually performed worse in our testing than the consumer drives. With about 5 years and 40+ petabytes of data, we're fairly confident this holds true.

Finally, we assume that all drives will fail and replace about 10 drives every week. The software is written such that the system takes drive failures into account and data is stored redundantly and continuously cross-checked.
While I really enjoyed the story, I felt much the same way as you about the ethics. They justify their decision to run business as usual, supporting the same rate of natural growth, etc. by saying they didn't want to raise prices for their customers, but I don't think that's really a fair reason (eminent business failure would be a fair reason). There were other options:

1. freeze registration of new accounts and purchase only the drives necessary to keep existing contractual obligations

2. charge new accounts at a different rate, promising to drop the rate once drive prices returned to normal

3. change plan storage volume limits

The only reason they didn't pick any of these 3 options, as far as I can tell, is because all of them were bad for their profit margins and it would be nice if they were upfront about that as the real driver for their actions. It's not clear that their business would have failed had they chosen one of these options.

So they chose a path that would screw over the little guy needing a new hard drive in San Francisco. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and the timing made it very difficult to act on these other options, or their cashflow couldn't handle it. That too would be nice to know, if it's the real driver of their actions.

Entirely rational behaviour (in the same position I'd do the same), but while an entertaining story, it's a hard to story to feel enthusiastic about even though in every other way it shows great leadership.
Ruby on Rails vs. Node.js at LinkedIn
I think the argument was that the Volt is more complex, but still has a much lower maintenance cost. If Tesla is worried about ongoing service costs eating their bottom line, include the price in the car, don't tack it on as a "service contract" this late in the process.

At $600/year and assuming a 10 year vehicle life, that's an additional $6000 towards the vehicle purchase price. People buying a Model S aren't going to flinch at that (myself included); demanding it as a yearly service fee and creating fear about losing your warranty is disingenuous at best.
This guy has not discovered what it means to be a programmer, he is simply in a phase of his programming life. Chasing down bugs all the time? Why? I don't do this, and when I run across a bug it is usually a quick fix and not a big deal.

The goal is not to write it perfectly without bugs. The goal is to release it perfectly without bugs, and to do this all you have to do is test your code often as you make changes to it. (alt tab || cmd tab is your best friend)

Now, if you are running into bugs that take you 4+ hours to resolve, you simply have not been programming long enough. Over time these will be trivial issues for you.

What is amazing about being a programmer is the ability to create amazing things. Being a programmer is not awesome because writing conditionals and for loops are badass.
Growing Like Bamboo
Sometimes I feel like people are starting to go out of their way to make it onto the "Shit HN Says" Twitter stream.
I get why they have a problem with this but it seems weird to punish the students for behaving like real world programmers. The entire FOSS movement could be written off as cheating with this mentality.
On our farm, we've reached a point where we cannot even justify growing GMO soybeans because the customers are willing to pay far more for non-GMO varieties. If that trend continues, their business model may be at risk anyway.
I like Bitbucket because they support both Mercurial and Git. They also acquired SourceTree (probably the best version control app on the Mac), employed the main developer and made the app free.
Which seems to confirm there would be a Tracemonkey even without V8 ever existing.
He is focusing on brand and logo.
Ask HN: Best way to crawl one site from multiple countries?
I'm doing some lightweight crawling of a site which offers different versions depending on the country of access.

Does anyone know of a reputable http proxy network service or other means to direct my requests through different countries? Or a hosting provider where I could rent cheap virtual machines to set up my own proxies in different countries?
Huh?

http://blog.inner-active.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/1737...
After being a FF user for so many years (since at least there was no hype behind it among average users), I caved in to Chrome finally and completely. Moved my bookmarks (lost tagging), history and sync, all to Google.
There's a difference between cheating and helping. If the professor believed that there were cheating, that meant that the work didn't appear to be original. Helping someone else means that you're helping them with the concepts related to the problem. If you want to be hands on with helping them through the problem you create a similar problem [that doesn't have the same requirements and help get them over what got them stuck]
Ask: Israeli alternative to stripe?
Hi,

I'm looking for a recurring billing service that supports Israeli merchants. Does anyone know of such?
> Which makes sense, as Cisco benefits more from having expensive Cisco products work well than from certification revenue.

I'm not sure about the actual comparative amounts, but Cisco makes a lot of money off of certifications. Of course, in the long run making them actually represent something is best for both sides of the business.
I think it's time to cut this 'version number' debate. Mozilla has been pretty clear about the plan to use such a system. The only problem was from enterprise users which Mozilla has addressed. The background auto-update is in the stable builds now, should be enough to keep FF updated. I am really tired of this versioning non-sense. Users complained, Mozilla addressed legitimate concerns. Now it's just a difference in perspective. Seems like the new system is actually helping Mozilla put out updates faster. Lets move on.
Failure rates are still likely to be low (<5% per annum)

I've only ever bought five external drives in my lifetime. Incidentally, all of them have been "shucked" over the years, and none of them have failed. They vary from 3-5 years old.

In fact, the only two drives I've had fail on me were OEM packaged, so based on my anecdotal, statistically insignificant personal experience you could even say the opposite, that external drives are more reliable than their OEM counterparts.

You never know. Perhaps the additional packaging prevents damage to the drives in transit, and the process of installing software on the drives (as I believe some manufacturers do with external drives) provides another opportunity to quality check the drives.
I don't think that's a fair argument. There's always a point in projects where you need to do something you don't want to do. At that point your work has become an obligation, which makes it something you don't love. You're forced to undergo the stress that we're discussing balancing. The key IMO is to find the right balance of working through that stress.
Exactly my point -- these 'new' Bitbucket features are a blatant clone of Github as well. I was expecting more from all the fanfare.

For instance, users are clamoring to be able to link external issue trackers of their choice (which can be done simply by URL). I think the first host to supply that feature will have a step up.
"Breaking into bits" suggests something about this technique that is not accurate. It does not rely on splitting bits, as in computing n bits and sending each of the n/2 bit halves to different servers.

It is closer to hiding one bit by flipping a coin and sending the bit xor-ed with the result to one server and the result of the flip to the other.
> I would argue that in this case we are seeing a misguided (and probably temporary) "zeal of the convert"

While many of your points are valid, I don’t see the author as a misguided person who has made a temporary, superficial discovery about interpersonal relationships. Having gone through a lot of this myself, I see the author as taking a huge first step towards the growth of his emotional intelligence. He implies that he has a history of speaking his mind (with a lack of tact). Now he is learning to emphathize and have pleasant relationships. The next step is learning to balance those things. Speak your mind when doing so is important, and consider the impact of your words while doing so. Sometimes telling someone a hard truth is the true kindness. As the author points out, the way you deliver those messages determines whether they are helpful or just hurtful.
Is 16 worth installing? Firefox used to be my favourite browser, but I stopped using it when the almost daily install and "reload or disable" addons cycle became too painful.
Yeah, I think the problem lies more for people who don't want to work so much but have to make huge sacrifices/give up job security to get that kind of freedom.
We use ActiveMQ at work and are investigating other MQs too. I dont see any info or performance graphs w.r.t message size. That would be a useful addition.
... Then they offer a 20% premium for anyone who wants to work for them and then the risk of being blacklisted is outweighed by the pleasure of more money and people would want to work for them again. Don't forget that these patent trolls are rich.
Lean pivoting bullets
Still not the feature I'd like in there: A way to open link here instead of in new tab or window
In many cases that's where I disagree with the courts. Unless the farmer's intentionally obtained original seeds from Mansanto outside of normal means, then I don't fault them for taking advantage of their crops ending up with said seeds.

Personally I would go the opposite route and do my best to prevent GM seeds from entering my crop. But that's just me.

Plus, not reading the cases you are referring to, was that it was actually found the farmers were doing this or that Monsanto convinced the court/jury that this is so? Remember that requirements of proof are much different for civil court versus criminal court.

Most of the cases I'm familiar with never got to jury, the farmers were bankrupt before getting that far or the farmers just gave in because it was cheaper to settle. Which I'm sure is as planned.
Check what extensions you are using. Firefox by itself uses much less memory and is very fast now.
Why does Firefox's roadmap look like "copy everything that Chrome has"?

If Firefox users needed (or wanted) marketplace for (web) apps (or any other Chrome feature) they'd already be using Chrome ...
Does anyone know why the Orbcomm needs such a specific orbit? If it's in orbit at all can't it do most of whatever it is supposed to do?

(Sorry probably a dumb question, huh)
Everything has to start somewhere. Unfortunately, this starting point has moved since the iPhone first came out. Microsoft learned this with Windows Phone; there is reasonable (but low) adoption, unfortunately due to missing features that developers and users consider to be standard, the ecosystem is still missing a few apps and some of the existing apps are/were (things have improved a little since 7.5) lower-featured than those same apps on other platforms. Windows Phone 7 would have been the best thing ever invented if it was released in 2007. Firefox OS would be as well. Windows 95 would have been magic when it was released in 1985.

Everything has to start somewhere. But where it ends up is highly dependent on how far it was when it was released.
Can you be more specific about the kinds of problems you are seeing? Can you reproduce these problems in safe mode? You should file a bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and put [MemShrink] in the whiteboard.
Still my favourite browser by far. I usually have 3-4 windows open and up to several hundred tabs and Firefox handles this better than anything else.
Words with Friends, Draw Something, Angry Birds, etc.

None of these are AAA titles. All of these are, or were, hugely popular with their players.

If you cannot imagine a smartphone mobile platfrom without AAA game titles then the failure isn't as a result of that platform; the failure is your imagination.
Show HN: Instant Image Design Feedback
EFF is kinda GNUish, while most devs who want to make money are BSDish (I'm generalizing a lot here, of course).
Qualcomm's $170,000 Android App Challenge
It's worth mentioning that the complete bug list is a lot larger: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/16.0/releasenotes/bugli...
That cycle should be invisible now. It updates silently in the background and should only notify you if an extension gets disabled.
How come no one complains about Chrome version numbers?
I'm sure that this has been said many times, but the "utilization" is not the same as the need to have the availability of the capacity - we could run some servers on a 386 and achieve 90% utilization, but now it takes two minutes to view a web page!

Also, CPUs are known to "step down" their clock speed to be power effecient when not under load - this is not included in a percentage of utilization.

Also, like someone else mentioned, bigger costs are the cooling techniques. Personally, I can't wait to see stuff like this utilized in the industry: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/26/this-fanless-heatsink-is-th...
Very unlikely, similar code? yes, exact duplicate? there are so many ways to solve it, that statistically it's not that likely, and if so, it will be on 1 answer, not all of them.
Its really annoying and alarming to hear technical people rebut this with "Well I could tell the difference because I noticed my browser changed and my super customized desktop settings weren't reproduced, and plus it says "now in full screen mode", etc.". Its alarming because this type of response just goes to show that the people creating things for the web are so completely out of touch with real users. There's this weird idea among developers that users know how to use technology just like we do when in fact they don't even know which website handles their email half the time, think Google is the internet, use the browser search bar to type full URLs even though the actual address bar is 10 pixels to the left, and will blame you for giving them a virus because you changed their desktop wallpaper and not because of all those shady links to foreign lotteries they were clicking in their email which they were lucky to find in the first place.

Yeah, you can tell the difference. I could tell the difference. Yes it was very obvious even though the demo was very accurate in reproducing my browser's chrome. But the rest of the world is nothing like us. Feross says 10% will be tricked. I think that's a very conservative estimate. I wouldn't be surprised is the numbers went above 50%. If this sort of attack becomes common then I bet you anything that the majority of users will be tricked just because full screen is not very common. You'll say full screen is common but again, you're thinking of people just like you who are in the minority. Most people have never seen a website in full screen mode. Even with Facebook's full screen option it doesn't mean your parents are clicking that option or have even noticed it yet.

I'm actually building an app currently that greatly benefits from the full screen API and I really hope vendors don't start putting more restrictions on it. Instead I'm hoping there's a way to make full screen more common in legitimate ways, get users used to full screen mode so they are aware of it and know what the little "Now in full screen mode" dialog means. Sure, people will still get tricked but I'd bet it would be in far less numbers and that 10% figure Feross throws out there might become more realistic.
Actually yes. I consider having legal counsel part of the cost of doing business.
I love the "Approve" button on the commits (maybe it was already there). Github needs a kick in the butt for more nice peer review features. Go BB! :)
Singapore? You are free in Singapore to the degree that their benevolent dictatorship wishes you to be.
In general 3D and Javascript doesn't yet mix too well.

But if you think that Games must be in 3D, try out any number of the cool non 3d games on the app store and see that they don't have to be.

That said Minecraft is actually a pretty heavy game to run - it surprised me at first too, but even blocky graphics need a not of computation to work.
Trigger.io and Apigee enable fast mobile app development for the enterprise
Sometimes I realize hours or days later that I missed something obvious and important, but of course I cannot do this for every social interaction because I don't have time. Also, thinking about it leaves me mentally exhausted in the same way that organic chemistry and advanced mathematics (two subjects I find easy) do for neurotypicals. But my after-the-fact realizations are contingent upon my noticing and remembering specific details that indicate emotion, which is totally hit-or-miss.
Seeing Your Site Through Others’ Eyes: Visual Test Tools